US Firefighter Deaths 2015

US Construction Deaths 2015

39% Falls, slips, trips

17% Contact with objects and equipment

2% Fires and explosions

15% Harmful substances or environments

24% Transportation incidents

3% Violence/injuries by persons or animalsThese figures might be expected to differ across countriesdue to reasons such as the national mix of industries andemployment (e.g. full time vs contracted vs casual), as wellas how the data are collected and analyzed. Moreover, asoccupational safety experts have commented, inaccurate andincomplete occupational injury data is unfortunately a generalfeature of workplace injury reporting, regardless of where itis collected. Nevertheless, a similar pattern appears across anumber of developed countries.

With the possible addition of mining, the list of dangerous jobs in
New Zealand and Australia closely resembles that of the United
States. Unfortunately, these countries diverge in how their overall
fatality rates are trending. New Zealand‘s overall fatality rate is
more than double that of Australia‘s, and two-thirds higher than
that of the United States. And while the Australian and US rates
are trending downwards, New Zealand’s rate has not declined.

Each country’s response to such dismal statistics is determined
by the depth of their understanding of the underlying causes,
how workplace health and safety is monitored, what policies are
implemented to improve occupational safety, and what is done to
enforce or incentivize improvements.

In many countries, public sector workers fare better in accident/
fatality statistics than workers in private industry. For example,
the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2015 reports that public
sector workers accounted for just 9% of occupational fatalities
and had a lower fatal injury rate ( 1. 9 per 100,000 FTEs) than their
private sector counterparts ( 3.6).

We might conclude that the most telling dissimilarity between
firefighting and construction is that firefighting is a public
service, whereas construction is a commercial enterprise.